Theme:
Unconventional Leadership

Last Wednesday, February 26th, the CEO club at NYIT hosted a TEDx event in unconventional leadership with Lorna Kelly, Kevin O'Connell and Courtney O'Connell. The club will host another TEDx in the upcoming months so stay tuned for more details!

Speakers

Born and raised in England, Lorna Kelly moved to America and became the first female fine arts auctioneer in America at Sotheby’s. At a turning point in her life, Ms. Kelly was inspired to travel to India to meet Mother Teresa and to work with her sisters, the Missionaries of Charity—tending to the poorest of the poor in Calcutta.
More recently, Lorna has experienced a series of great highs and lows—as her journey continues, we travel with her to New England where she becomes physically and psychologically lost; in Texas she is a witness to an execution; in New York she is confronted with breast cancer and performs in a major motion picture Sex and the City.

Kevin O'Connell is a social media strategist, consultant, speaker and founder of The Niche Movement - the movement to help young people avoid employment unhappiness and find their niche. Currently, Kevin serves as the Assistant Director of Marketing & Social Media for Rutgers University Campus Recreation department. He finds fulfillment in teaching people not only how to create content that engages their audience, but how to discover their digital voice and maximize it. On a personal note, Kevin has a two yearr old black lab named Luke, he's a former collegiate golfer, loves a good mac n' cheese and some might say that his country music Spotify playlist is the best one out there.

Courtney O’Connell is a rising leader on the topic of innovation in education. Her TEDx talk “Go All In on Education” provoked a national conversation on innovation in education, and has been viewed over 1600 times. Courtney envisioned and served as the project manager for the Big Ideas in Higher Education Conference, a conference that was named Event of the Year by Brainzooming.com and featured in MeetingsNet Magazine. Courtney was acknowledged for her entrepreneurial approaches in education as a 99U Conference Fellow in 2013, and as an inductee into the American College Personnel Association’s prestigious honor society. She recently was hired to work along side best-selling author Erik Qualman as Director of Business Design. Courtney is determined to disrupt the current education system in hopes of making education a more engaging and meaningful experience for all students.